An anti-violence culture is a prerequisite for abolishing the death penalty, a public discussion on the relation between capital punishment and human rights heard Friday.
Rocky Gerung, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Indonesia, said the idea of capital punishment was a logical fallacy.
“Punishing someone with the death penalty is said to prevent other people, potential criminals, from committing similar crimes. This is an extraordinary logical fallacy,” he said.
Indonesia applies the death penalty for premeditated murder, terrorism and drug-related crimes.
Human rights activists have recently criticized the National Police for the high number of suspects shot dead during manhunts and raids of terrorist suspects.
The police argued they had to shoot the suspects because they were armed and dangerous but some media reports said some suspects were unarmed. Critics said the on-site fatal shooting of suspects was capital punishment against terrorism.
Zuhairi Misrawi, an intellectual who chairs the Moderate Muslim Society, said that among the Muslim community it was not easy to reconstruct the interpretation of the death penalty because Islamic teaching explicitly supported it.
“For example, there’s a notion that behind the death penalty of one person there are lives of many people,” he said. “Nevertheless, as seen in the case of terrorism in our country, the death penalty has not brought deterrent effects to terrorists,” he added.
Zuhairi said that despite the difficulty to change the interpretation of the religious teaching supporting the death penalty, there would be chances to change the attitudes toward it as the paradigm of Islamic law kept developing and might shift.
Poengky Indarti, the executive director of the Indonesian Human Rights Monitor or Imparsial, said that the second amendment of Article 28I of the Constitution guaranteed the rights to live were non-negotiable rights.
“This is strengthened through the ratification of the Civil and Political Rights Covenant into the 2005 law, which prohibited the death penalty,” Poengky said.
She added that several studies in various countries had shown that the death penalty was not effective as a deterrent to convicts of gross crimes. “The application of the death penalty in Indonesia, especially for drugs-related crimes, does not decrease their number,” she said.
Another problem with the death penalty in the country is related to the state’s long delay of execution, Poengky went on.
“The convicts become the victims of law violation because although they are sentenced to imprisonment, they have to wait for years in prison,” she said.
The group records that from 1998 to 2010, Indonesia has executed 21 convicts with some waiting more than 10 years for execution.
Right now, there are 204 convicts who have been sentenced to death and most are proposing legal
appeals.
